After 110 people took
second place in a 2005 Powerball lottery by picking five of six correct
numbers, the sequence they all played was traced back to a fortune-cookie
factory in Queens which had printed them on a recent fortune. A New York
Times reporter
named Jennifer 8. Lee, assigned to report on the story, wound up increasingly
curious about the diners who played the numbers. As a second-generation
Chinese-American, Lee grew up fetching Chinese takeout and wondering why her
mother's cooking never resembled the contents of the classic white cartons; for The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures In The World Of Chinese
Food, she
traces the history of Chinese food in America with trenchant, but entertaining,
curiosity.
While Lee's obsession with
Chinese food began long before the fortune-cookie lottery, her travels to find
the Powerball winners, and the restaurants where they dined, led her to trace
the paths of other takeout accoutrements, like soy-sauce packets and home
delivery. (That started in 1976, thanks to the enterprising owner of a failing
restaurant.) Her explorations into different aspects of the Chinese-restaurant
industry in America—from the moment where she sees the ancestral home of
the real General Tso, who undoubtedly never tasted or cooked the dish that
bears his name, to interviews with restaurant workers from Fujian province, who
paid more than $40,000 to come to America to work—form a peripatetic
itinerary, with each piece closer in tone to the wide-eyed how-stuff-works
musings of Freakonomics than a direct path to takeout enlightenment. If any aspect of
her quest unites the book's disparate scenes, it's Lee's investigation into the
history of the fortune cookie, a food that probably isn't Chinese, might be
part Japanese, and is certainly beloved of Americans.
Lee's guiding
principle—that American Chinese food from chop suey to Seamless Web has
taken on a life beyond its national origins—sidesteps, for the most part,
the globalizing implications of a plate of beef and broccoli, in favor of
tastier tidbits on inland migration and the kosher Chinese kitchen. Her
fascination with the origins of her childhood dinners turns up an assortment of
intriguing characters, but the most riveting is the author, who has lived in
China and knows what "real" Chinese cuisine looks and tastes like, but is drawn
to its evolved—some might say bastardized—American form anyway.